Anna Karenina

By Reviewed by Vicki Fairfax

MAKE no mistake, this production of Anna Karenina plays fast and loose with Tolstoy's mighty novel.

Eifman Ballet's production of Anna Karenina.Credit:Janie Barrett

Conservative, fastidious Karenin (Oleg Markov) now simmers with barely restrained violence. Indeed, there is an undercurrent of sadism throughout this ballet that can be discomforting; artistic director Boris Eifman taking, literally perhaps, the biblical exhortation that opens Tolstoy's work, ''Vengeance is mine and I will repay''?

Complicit in this is the character of Anna (Maria Abashova), who never completely emerges from the shadows and whose bone-warping leaps and high, convulsive lifts, somewhat paradoxically, serve only to heighten the sense of her passivity and subjection.

In the end the ballet's brilliant, restless athleticism rends apart any sense of emotional authenticity. Real depth of emotional expression is often at its most compelling in stillness and there is little of it here. Certainly, the technical versatility of these dancers is breathtaking. It is a wonder then that choreography that places such physical demands, in the end, elicits so little genuine emotion. Such overwrought choreography, married to some of Tchaikovsky's lushest music, can seem dangerously contrived.

But Anna Karenina does achieve some intriguing moments. There are those scenes, especially where the corps de ballet becomes a kind of Greek chorus giving expression to the fussy, self-important conventions of 19th-century Russian society and the predatory salaciousness of masked Venetians at a mardi gras. But perhaps most tellingly it is the corps' ominous, climactic simulation of the reverberations of the approaching train in the closing moments where it rings most true.